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Celery Sauce

A sauce made by blending boiled celery with a flour and butter roux, simmered until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Celery Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the celery

  1. Cut celery into small bits and boil in water for a few minutes.

  2. Strain the water from the celery.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix flour and butter in a bowl.

  2. Stir the mixture into the boiling milk.

  3. Add the celery to the butter mixture and stir over heat for 5 to 10 minutes.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + celerytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,905 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + celerytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,491 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the sauce as it heats with the butter and milk.
Butter
Forms a fat base with the flour that helps thicken the sauce smoothly.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as it cooks.
Celery
Provides the main flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour and butter into the boiling milk. Adding the flour-butter mixture to hot liquid while stirring keeps it dispersed. Without constant stirring, the flour can clump into lumps instead of thickening the sauce evenly.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, milk):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Jalapenofits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, milk. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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